PacificEast is launching a new brand and division called IDICIA. The primary driver for the decision to go through all this work was clarity. This year PacificEast is twenty-five years old. It is an established brand and has a good reputation, especially for our customer service and flexibility, and lots of great services. But over the last five years we have begun to add even more services, especially those that are real-time. Seven years ago PacificEast had about twelve types of data hygiene and appending services. Today, driven by both customer demand and some strategic developments we’ve made, that number has increased to over fifty. But as our product line has gotten larger, we have seen our services condensing into two primary areas. In one area we have batch hygiene and append services for our fundraising, healthcare and educational customers. In the other area we have our real-time verification and fraud prevention services for our eCommerce, financial services and identity verification customers. These are two very different sets of needs from two very different kinds of customers within two very different types of markets. This duality, paired with our desire to serve each market well with a very focused and clear message, is what drove the birth of IDICIA. [More]

The problem with consumer consent’s current status is that consent is analog. It is subjective. Consent needs to be digital and objective. Without this transition, consumer consent can never be interoperable. Interoperability matters. Currency works because exchange rates are standardized and use of “money” is interoperable. The internet works because the IP protocol on which it is based is standardized and interoperable by multiple parties. Credit cards work because the banks agree on network transactional standards like those from Visa and MasterCard. If every bank built their own protocol and used their own proprietary transaction structure, credit would not be interoperable and, therefore, what would be the point of it. So when something is interoperable its use can be broadened from one or two parties to many. Hence, interoperability is the ‘ante’ for scalability. [More]

In their native market of selling minutes, bytes and devices telcos, especially MNOs, know they live in a zero-sum world. Every customer they sign up is one less customer available to their competitors. But as we mentioned in our recent whitepaper, The ARPU of Identity, there are other markets that aren’t zero-sum. The identity attribute market is a federated market where telcos can only succeed if they cooperate and acknowledge the importance of other MNOs to their own success. For MNOs to be successful in this very different market, they must contend with and adapt to this dichotomy. [More]

You haven’t heard much from us over the summer, but not because we’ve been vacationing. We’ve been working on a whitepaper most of the summer called the ARPU of Identity. The whitepaper, published this week by the Open Identity Exchange (OIX), was written with the telecom community in mind, especially those who want to consider the pros and cons of participating in various identity management initiatives.[More]

For many years I have advocated the concept that fraud and ID theft grows, like mushrooms, in the dark. In light of an almost daily barrage of news stories detailing the most recent million or hundred million identities to have been stolen there is an understandable yet very wrong tendency to believe that hiding identity information will keep it safe. The opposite is actually true. There is information that no-one needs to know and information that everyone needs to know and information that just a few need to know. Identity actually falls into the last category, not the first. [More]

We understand that we are accountable to the Consumer as a steward of their information.We understand that we are accountable to RegulatorsWe understand that we are accountable to our Customers and Stakeholders [More]

The inconvenient truth of the identity ecosystem is that the eco stands for economics, no ecology. In biological and natural systems the “eco” in ecosystem refers to ecology--the relationship of an organism to its surroundings. And while some of that same sense of the interrelation of parts within a system can apply to the identity ecosystem as well, the dirty truth that identity and privacy experts don’t seem to like to admit is that unless an identity ecosystem makes money, or at least is self-supporting, it can be little more than a group of well-meaning experts sitting around a circle discussing their opinions of how identity and privacy should work. I have sat in several of these circles and they are always informative and often positive so I’m not saying those discussions don’t have value. But the recurring problem in almost every pilot to test these well-informed principles suffers from a lack of eco in the eco system.[More]

Just as the universe has finely tuned constants, so too PacificEast Research finely tunes its constants to be agile, technically savvy and trustworthy. We place a high priority on understanding the Customer’s industry requirements in order to provide identity verification products that give our customers a good return on investment. Therefore, PacificEast Research takes time to identify the highest quality of data accessible, knowing that the Customer’s measurement of success depends upon a slim variance in quality and quantity of results.[More]

PacificEast Research is intent on building trusted relationships with each vendor, customer and competitor. We are always in a mode of continuous improvement as we stand on the shoulders of each available talent in the identity, verification and data industries. If it will help you to stand on our shoulders you have an open invitation to do so. Data technologists know that we are just starting to discover the information that is there.[More]

One of the more vocal sub-populations in the identity community focuses on consumer privacy. But privacy, like the word identity, has taken on a different meaning in the context of technology that differs from its pre-tech, historical meaning. Privacy originally meant being away from others or being alone. When you wanted privacy, you went somewhere absent of other people. In our connected world, being absent of other people is both horribly true and horribly false. Horribly true because as a connected society we run the risk of only connecting digitally which many claim isn’t really a “connecting” at all. Horribly false because any digital connection is, of necessity, made possible only by others even if the only other is our ISP. But privacy has been recast to mean a person’s right to control what information is revealed to the public and what information is not.[More]